Try it on paper first. A hint, the key idea and the worked solution are here when you need them.
A cylinder with insulating walls holds a mixture of of helium and of nitrogen, at and . Treat both as ideal gases, helium as monatomic and nitrogen as diatomic with rigid molecules. A piston squeezes the mixture slowly until its volume is one quarter of the first volume. Take and the molar mass of helium as .
Have you tried it?
Work it out on paper first. It is fine to get stuck or make a mistake: that is how we learn. When you are ready, go through the solution one step at a time, and check each step against your own.
Plan. Build the heat capacities of the mixture, use the adiabatic relations with that , then the first law for the work.
Step 1. Gamma (a). In units of : and . So
Step 2. Temperature (b). is fixed, so .
Step 3. Work (c). No heat flows, so the work done on the gas is the rise in internal energy:
Step 4. Pressure (d). is fixed, so .
Step 5. Helium speed (e). Every gas in the mixture has the same temperature. For helium . The top line is , so
It was at the start.
Answer: (a) . (b) . (c) . (d) . (e) .
Check. lies between (all nitrogen) and (all helium), closer to nitrogen because there are more moles of it and each holds more energy. And equals , as the gas law needs.
Watch out. Do not average the two values of by moles: gives a wrong answer. Heat capacities add; their ratio does not.
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